by J. Thorn
"So it is. Your resume mentioned web work. Can you elaborate?"
"I've designed graphics for a half dozen different sites. I've been designing and writing my own blogs since before there was a word for them. I had a popular one that covered art supplies—pens, brush brands. I think that will carry over here."
She frowned, round cheeks puffing. "Traffic?"
"For my site?"
"No, for the 405. I was thinking of running out for some tapas."
"Before I moved on, I was drawing about 1500 unique visitors a month." Raymond's mouth twitched as Lana literally rolled her eyes. He'd been trying to keep things pro. "Is something the matter?"
"Something? No. Some things? Take your pick." She ticked off her points on her fingers, bending them back until the knuckles cracked. "You don't have a BA in the field. No direct experience writing copy. The best you can muster is a website that wasn't even a blip on the screen and has been dead for years. What I'm not understanding is who cleared you for an interview in the first place."
"I know my resume isn't a knockout. That's because I'm the only guy in LA County who doesn't lie on it. That's what I'm offering: honesty. I can do this job."
"I don't need a guy who'll tell me when my ass is looking big. I need a guy who can write me crisp, compelling copy. You're not that guy."
Raymond stood. "Fuck you."
"Excuse me?" She drew back in her chair, chin disappearing inside her high collar.
"You're talking to me like you never expect to see me again. So fuck off."
"Security's going to squash you like a toad." She reached for the phone and they probably would have, but he'd already left, walking down the sidewalk in a wrap of sunshine, smelling salt from the shore and grilled carne asada from the truck down the block. He hadn't told her to fuck off out of anger, but more out of the conviction that if you don't make a habit of standing up for yourself in the small moments, you'll never be able to do it when the big ones rolled around. Well, that and some anger. Anyway, it would make a better story for Mia.
Mia, when he'd told her they were out of money, that unless something changed, within two months they'd be living out of his car or, with luck, a spare room at one of his siblings', had been exactly the woman he'd married: concerned but forgiving, miles from petty, focused on nothing but making it together. She'd reached across the table and taken his hand and said they'd be okay.
He'd fully resolved to put his graphics career, if he could use the word without stringing quotes around it, on hiatus. A man on a mission, he'd replied to every feasible want ad on Craigslist. Most hadn't replied. A handful scheduled interviews. Lana Englund had been his first.
Mia smiled when he relayed his day. "Nowhere to go but up."
"Or postal."
"It's one interview."
"Maybe I should stop wasting time on the ambitious positions. I can worry about liking my job after I've stopped worrying about starving to death."
"You know what?" She grabbed his waist, shaking him like the beautiful thing you're compelled to destroy. "We should do something fun."
"You look like you already are," he said, voice rattling as she shook him.
"We should go live on the beach this weekend. I mean with tents and vodka-canteens and public urination."
"All of that is illegal."
"Who cares?" She released him, tugged open the crumbling curtain that overlooked their wild backyard, the lemon trees and wildflowers and the fifty-foot magnolia tree with its red, corn-cobby buds. "If we have to leave soon, why not have some fun? Enjoy the damn place? This is Southern California. Let's love it while we can."
He had to smile. "Of all the things you have to choose from, you want to go camping three blocks from your house?"
She put up her dukes, hopped forward, and tapped him in the gut with a fist. "It's free, isn't it?"
He couldn't argue with that. In between emailing his resume around and clipping coupons, he went down to the basement, a half-finished space cluttered to the point of unnavigability by books, tools, jars of screws, camera lenses and developing fluid, and half-painted, rough-sawn wood scraps from his dad's old projects. Decades ago, before his birth when they too had been too poor to do much else, his parents had been campers. Between two sawhorses and beneath a layer of dust thick enough to write your name in, Raymond dug up a tent, metal stakes, some tarps, canteens, and a tackle box that still smelled like bait, plasticky and fishy.
Saturday morning, they drove to the beach. He left most of the gear in the trunk until dark. They made up some rules: no leaving the beach unless a) the bathrooms were closed or b) to stow the tent in the mornings. When smoking weed, make sure no one could see the fire. Bag up all their trash. And absolutely no talk of money.
The sun bounced off the water and the sand; within an hour, Raymond had to break the first rule to go buy stronger sunscreen. It was late March and he knew the water in the bay had carried down the coast from Alaska, but he waded to his knees, coaxing Mia out into the curling surf until the soles of their feet went numb. They combed for shells, smelling salt and kelp and warm sand. On the rocks at the south end of the bay, where the mansions of Palos Verdes clung to the cliffs on eighty-foot stilts, small black flies swarmed in thousands over brown mats of drying kelp. He overturned stones, searching for crabs.
"I've been down here two dozen times and I've never seen a single fish," he said. "How hard can it be to find a fish in an ocean?"
"Maybe they just don't like you," she smiled. They'd been swigging warm vodka from a metal flask.
"Then they must know something you don't."
"Or vice versa. I've seen you naked."
"Maybe we should educate them."
After midnight, drunk and grinning, they carried two towels down to the tideline, laid one beneath them and one over them, and made love amidst the sand, the moon, the waves. Once they finished and Raymond had caught his breath, he popped up, naked, and faced the sea.
"Get a good look, fish. One night only." He plopped down on the towels, pawing in the moonlight for his underwear. "Why can't I shake the feeling this is a trial run for how we'll be living a few weeks from now?"
She waggled a finger in his face. "No money-talk, remember?"
"Who said anything about money? I'm talking about bindles and cans of beans."
"We'll have to memorize the train schedules."
"I think a barrel with two straps would look very flattering on you."
"We can't go homeless when we have a home, can we? Maybe we can get a thing. A lien."
"No money talk!" She sprung from the sand in a flash of light brown, her skin speckled with the darker spots of her nipples, belly button, and the gap between her legs. She tackled him on his back and smushed a towel into his face. "Gonna follow the rules? Or do I have to smother you?"
They woke sticky-mouthed and sunburnt, hungry and hungover. Between a couple covert puffs, packing the tent in the trunk, and a walk through the not-quite-cold morning, the fog lifted from their heads, the poison washed from their flesh. Just past the breakers, dolphins paralleled the shore, sleek gray fins shedding seawater.
When they drove the half mile home on Sunday afternoon, Raymond felt no less charged and refreshed than if they were on their way back from a trip across the Pacific. An interview request waited in his inbox. Wednesday morning, a video store just a few blocks up the street. Part-time clerk position. He didn't care. Low stress and more time to build his freelance career.
"Good luck," Mia kissed him. "You'll do great."
He walked, meaning to save gas and pick up some exercise. Besides, the weather, as usual, was glorious, a clear-blue day with the typical breeze tousling the towering palms. He, like everyone, had heard about Los Angeles weather before moving here, but after living through a fall, winter, and the early part of spring without feeling any temperature below 42 degrees, he still had a hard time believing that on any given day he could walk outside in a t-shirt—that in the middle of
November, it had been too hot to do anything but jump in the ocean. Cars grunted down the PCH. A young Hispanic woman with a smooth belly trotted after a gasping dachshund. By the time he reached the video store, a light sweat filmed his back.
He nailed his interview. He was roughly the same age as the long-haired guy who questioned him and was able to make him laugh repeatedly, finding common ground over the greatness of Dead Alive and Repo Man. When they discussed Raymond's post-college two years with a UPS store, the guy had flat-out said it sounded harder than his own job. He promised to let Raymond know by the end of the week.
Raymond walked out feeling good. Like he had a chance. He knew he shouldn't count on it until he walked in for his first day, and that it was almost certainly a tedious job, one he'd be sick of six months in and ready to quit two years later, but it meant he'd be okay. He'd eat. He and Mia would sleep and wake in their own house. Miles from rich, but in exchange for five hours of his day, five days a week, he could continue a reasonable approximation of an American existence. Strange how fast everything changed. A couple weeks ago, he'd been concerned about their very ability to go on eating from non-Dumpster sources, and sending out dozens of resumes and getting back virtually nothing in response had done nothing to dam his rising tide of fears. Yet an hour at a video store had reduced those worries to a placid ebb.
Up the block, a beefy bald man in a blue suit spilled out of a Thai restaurant, clamped his hands to his knees, and vomited into a strip of grass.
Raymond jogged forward. "Hey, you okay?"
The man heaved again, yellow noodles mingled with bright red fluid—curry sauce? Raymond held up a few feet away, reached for his cell. The man straightened, pale as a page, swaying like a palm in a coastal storm. Red tears dribbled from his eyes.
"Sir?"
The man waved one thick hand, groping for something that wasn't there. Viscous reddish drool gleamed from his chin. He panted in shallow hitches, head bobbing with each breath, as if he were slamming it to a punk show beneath the stage of the Whisky A Go-Go and not puking, mid-afternoon, on the sidewalk of Redondo Beach.
"Run," the man said. Blood trickled from his eyes. Without warning, he fell straight backwards, stiffly awkward, head cracking the sidewalk like a bottle wrapped in a blanket.
Raymond took a step backward. A siren shrieked up the PCH. Under the warm California sun, the stranger's blood sunk into the sidewalk's spidery cracks.
4
Walt was glad to see Vanessa sick. Real-sick, not fake-sick, be it his forced coughs or some nebulous notion of a weak valve that could collapse on him at any time. Which, incidentally, had cut both ways. On the one hand, she cared again. She didn't stay out so late. She replied to his texts within minutes instead of hours/never. Brought soft tacos from the Ecuadorian place down the block. Held his hand while they watched movies on the couch. Even fucked him, after a two-week drought, gently and apologetically and with an earnestness that let him believe they were back on track.
But she couldn't keep her mouth shut, telling his parents about his "condition" even after he'd asked her not to. They had, in usual fashion, scheduled an appointment for him with one of their own specialists on Long Island.
So when Vanessa got sick—well, there was a sweetness to that. A little payback. It kept her in the apartment, too. She depended on him. She just felt too weak, she said, and seeing the way she coughed, one hand clenched to her mouth while the other waved as spastically as if she'd swallowed a moth, well, he could believe it. She wasn't the type to take sick days. After the report of the death in Idaho, that limb-curdling cough worried him, undercutting his pleasure, but then he'd bring her a mug of green tea and she'd smile at him, a smile he hadn't seen in months, that summed up her simple beauty like the green flash of the last second of a tropical sunset, and he'd remind himself people died of the flu every year, especially old people who lived in Idaho, and that she'd be fine in a few days.
But as improved as things seemed, when she went to the bathroom and he checked the drawer where she kept her ticket stubs, the letter was still there.
Three days later, she couldn't sleep from coughing. He paced to the window, considered the traffic. "I'm calling a doctor."
"No doctors," she said, ensconced in the comforter, voice ragged with phlegm.
"You were fine with them when I got sick."
"And you came back thinking you could die at any moment."
"You'd rather I dropped dead without warning?"
"I'd rather you lived to forever and had a spout that dispensed tea."
"That would require a lot more doctors." He sat down on the bed. The heat of her body felt strong enough to cook breakfast. He reached for her hand. "We're going to make a deal. If you're not better in two days, I'm making you an appointment."
She frowned, wrinkling the corners of her glassy brown-green eyes. "That sounds more like an ultimatum than a deal."
"So your fever still hasn't zapped your thinking. I'll have to wait until you're delirious to ask you to change your will."
She rolled her eyes but laughed, thick barks that morphed into a wet and gloomy cough. Two days later, she was no better; sometimes she had to lean on him on her way to the bathroom.
His doctor was booked for the next two weeks.
"That won't work," he told the receptionist over his cell. "In two weeks she'll be better."
"Then what do you need a doctor for?"
"In case she isn't."
"Then we'll see what we can do for her at that time."
"Say it's something serious. Do you know how many times a person can die in two weeks?"
The man sighed. "What's she got? The flu? Just like everyone else? Plenty of water, some orange juice, a decongestant or three, hey. All better."
On the off chance the receptionist was currently operating a telescope, Walt scowled uptown. "Is that your professional opinion?"
"As a state-licensed, Hippocrates-sworn nobody? Absolutely."
"Look, what if she were growing a third hand? Or had blood squirting out of her belly button? There must be a protocol for vaulting the queue."
"Go get her some NyQuil," the man spat. "If she's improved before you're scheduled to come in, please cancel the appointment in advance, will you?"
"Anything to help." Walt hung up. The corner bodega was out of anything resembling NyQuil, Advil, Cold-Eeze, or Flintstones chewable vitamin tablets. Up at Yukio's, where he wasn't due in for another four hours, he fared no better.
"Walt?" Behind the counter, Yukio pushed his white cap to the back of his head. "You're early, man. Like, by most of a day."
"My girlfriend's sick, but apparently we're no longer concerned with profiting off the illnesses of others."
Yukio grinned, ducked under the counter, and flipped a green NyQuil bottle at Walt, who promptly fumbled it, allowing him, as it skittered across the shoeprinted tile floor, to discover the bottle was plastic.
"Been saving it," his boss said. "We sold out days ago. Make it last—we're supposed to get more next week, but the way this city's coughing right now, I'm doubting it."
Walt tapped the bottle in his palm. "Thanks. See you tonight."
He brought the bottle home to Vanessa, then went back out to hit up every bodega, grocery, and Duane Reade he could find. He wasn't a scaremonger—after 9/11, every grocer south of 14th Street had run out of bread, milk, and everything else with an expiration date by the day after, which only made him roll his eyes and swear about having to walk up to Midtown for a fucking bagel—but unlike most of these surgeon-mask-wearing dipshits stocking up on cold medicine and face masks, Vanessa actually needed it, and given his proximity to her, he probably would soon, too. In the grocery stores, the white ladies wore transparent plastic gloves. An empty circle appeared around anyone who coughed. He tried three more pharmacies before he found a Walgreens with a single bottle of aspirin. The selfishness of it floored him. Unless the entire goddamn city was sick, no way that should be happening.
But the whole city wasn't sick. A lot of coughing, yeah, a handful of pale faces and people resting against street signs while they waited to jaywalk, but for the most part, you still had your same old hustling crush of pedestrians. Middle Eastern guys still sold fruit from sidewalk stands, and behind them, the Gristedes and Cafe Metros and Chinese joints still saw a constant flush of customers. That meant people were hoarding. Preemptively stealing resources out of the fear there might not be any left if they ended up needing them later on, thus guaranteeing people went without them now. It made him feel like knifing somebody. Several somebodies. After buying up all the Band-Aids in town.
The squeak and clunk of his shoes on the hardwood woke Vanessa. She squirmed upright, rubbing yellow gunk from her eyes, tucking her greasy hair behind her ears.
"Brought you some aspirin." He rattled the bottle. "Had to go to like eight different places. Half the city's sick and the other half's a bunch of assholes."
She smiled, a beacon beneath her patina of illness. "You're so sweet to me."
And he was. Whatever his faults (and Walt presumed he had a few), whenever someone close to him needed something, he gave without complaint or hesitation. At times it was practically a compulsion, so reflexive Walt didn't always consider it a virtue. Nor did he resent sacrificing his time or money or self-interest. If someone needed, they deserved; if he could give it, it was theirs.
Vanessa, though, sometimes she forgot it was a sacrifice. She felt entitled. Partially, he blamed it on the acting: when you come to expect eyeballs on your every word and gesture, pretty soon you start to expect the hands and brains behind them to start giving as well. Whatever the case, it had been weeks? months? since she'd expressed more than bare thanks when he did the dishes, took her clothes to the laundromat, or made vindaloo, her favorite, spiced so ruthlessly it made their noses run.
Hearing her now, he almost had to turn away. "It's nothing. People who love each other go to eight million stores for a stupid bottle of aspirin."
"I'm not sure. A hell of a lot of people treat each other like servants who can't even remember which side of the toast the butter goes on." She sat up further, pressing her fingers to her sweat-damp chest. "I hate getting sick, but a part of me loves it. It's the only chance I get to slow down. It's easy to miss what's in front of you when you're always flying past at 90 miles an hour."